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What is the function of Ether being divisible to 18 decimal places?
cointon
Member Posts: 9 ✭
Is an atto-ether, or one quintillionth of an ether really necessary?
That's 0.000000000000000001 ether.
A billionth of a billionth of a unit.
In other words, there are 2-3 orders of magnitude more units in a single ether than there will ever be satoshis in the entire Bitcoin system.
(2 quadrillion 100 trillion satoshis).
A single ether is around 476 Bitcoin systems in terms of units.
So if you invest 10 BTC in Ethereum, you will have as many units as 9.5 million Bitcoin systems.
If 90000000 ether are created to start the system, that's 42.8 billion Bitcoin systems in terms of units.
Isn't that a little ridiculous?
Doesn't this kind of divisibility make the numbers on the other side of the decimal irrelevant?
It's inconceivable.
That's 0.000000000000000001 ether.
A billionth of a billionth of a unit.
In other words, there are 2-3 orders of magnitude more units in a single ether than there will ever be satoshis in the entire Bitcoin system.
(2 quadrillion 100 trillion satoshis).
A single ether is around 476 Bitcoin systems in terms of units.
So if you invest 10 BTC in Ethereum, you will have as many units as 9.5 million Bitcoin systems.
If 90000000 ether are created to start the system, that's 42.8 billion Bitcoin systems in terms of units.
Isn't that a little ridiculous?
Doesn't this kind of divisibility make the numbers on the other side of the decimal irrelevant?
It's inconceivable.
Post edited by cointon on
Comments
It's not a billionth of a unit, it's a billionth of a billionth of a unit which to give you an idea is the scale of a quark in terms of meters.
http://htwins.net/scale2/
Maybe a physicist can get used to that.
The only way this would be necessary is if ether became some kind of base functional unit for the entire future world distributed network.
Divisibility doesn't affect value - if a British Pound had 10 numbers after the decimal point, it would still be worth one British Pound.
I.e., 10.00 == 10.0000000000000000